Friday, January 27, 2006

Sugar (not) High Friday #15 (I tried...)

This time the Sugar High Friday is hosted by Becks&Posh, and they've decided to replace the 'high' with 'low'. The task:is to make a delicious, mouthwatering dessert whilst being a lot more frugal than usual with the fat and the sugar. In fact, try not to use processed sugar at all.

Inspiration struck me about a week ago on Glasgow-Edinburgh train when I was flipping through the pages of the January issue of Waitrose Food Illustrated. On page 11 it states thatThe parsnip's season is November to January, so this is the last chance to get them at their best. Winter frosts will also have intensified their already marked sweetness; in days gone by, this root was used instead of sugar in cakes.

Voila! I like carrot cakes a lot, and if parsnip was used instead of sugar in the old days, I could try to make a parsnip cake which is like carrot cake, but without sugar. I also had a packet of sucrose free ginger (Buderim Ginger from Australia) in my cupboard, and I thought that ginger should work quite well with parsnip. I checked out some of my carrot cake recipes, and eventually decided to make parsnip, ginger and hazelnut tray bake.

Well. It wasn't bad. If I'd be served this, I'd happily finish the piece. But it wasn't blogging-worthily good either, verging on the bland, so I'll keep the recipe to myself this time. It was much nicer on the morning after, when the ginger had had time to depart some of its gingery goodness into the rest of the cake (that ginger was actually delicious on its own as well, I hadn't tried this particular type of ginger previously).

But, to be truly honest, I should have just made the sugar-free Luscious Apple Cake recipe from the very same Waitrose magazine..

8 comments:

I am glad I am not the only one who feels let down by their experiment - but hey - it was good to play right? you are right aboutt he apple cake though - maybe I will give that one a try. it looks rather yumptious.

That apple cake sounds great! You should give it a go anyway.Buderim ginger is pretty big over here in a real "Aussie pride" kind of way.:-) My grandmother lives half the year in Buderim and has always loved ginger so she's in heaven. I have to say I'm not such a fan of the big chunks of crystallised gigner they make. I prefer my sugared ginger to be in thin slices, like I discovered it in Japan recently.

Thanks for your kind words, Anne. We must try that apple cake soon. And I liked your biscotti!

Niki - I'm not so keen on ginger, but I really liked that Buderim version! I ate most of the ginger-rich pieces of the cake with my friend - I guess it disguised the sugarfree blandness of the cake very well:) Though I must admit I chopped it up a bit - I'm afraid the big chunks would have been a bit too much indeed..